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Tuesday, 29 November 2016

Today, I'm thrilled to welcome author of The Christmas Promise (TCP), Sue Moorcroft to talk about Writing the Christmas Novel! TCP has done very well since the ebook release on 6 October 2016, and currently has 63 Amazon UK reviews (of which 53 are 5 star, and 7 are 4 star). Recently, TCP has reached the top 5 in the Amazon UK Kindle chart (and is this morning, number 3!). Congratulations, and over to you, Sue...!

Writing the Christmas Novel, by Sue Moorcroft

It was some time ago that I watched Christmas novels selling year on year and decided that I ought to write one. I also talked over ideas with my agent and she picked the Christmassy one as having the most commercial potential – i.e. she felt confident in being able to sell The Christmas Promise to publishers because it was the one she felt the publishers would be able to sell to the readers.

Why do people like Christmas novels? Maybe they just want to extend their enjoyment of the atmosphere of present-giving and fab meals with loved ones, of munching on chocolates and watching Christmas Specials on TV. Or maybe it’s because the characters are probably having a worse Christmas then the readers are!

Ava, my heroine, isn’t a Christmas fan. To make sense of this in the context of a novel I gave her unpleasant associations from her childhood. To ensure she’d dislike this Christmas in particular I ran her millinery business into trouble. I also let ex-boyfriend, Harvey, threaten Ava that if she doesn’t go back to him he’ll disclose intimate pictures of her, the crime we popularly refer to as ‘revenge porn’. He makes the threat whenever he’s had a drink. And he drinks a lot.

Sam’s conflicts are less of his own making but just as intense. His mum Wendy is in the elapse between surgery and chemotherapy and he’s trying to make Christmas wonderful for her. He commissions a special gift, which is what involves Ava in The Christmas Promise of the title, a promise she finds increasingly hard to keep.

It takes me quite a while to write a book. This one took about nine months so I couldn’t count on having the Christmas atmosphere of snow and sleigh bells to sweep me through the process. July sun pouring through my study window or not, I needed to invoke Christmas myself, to select Christmas presents for my characters to give to one another and the Christmas shows they might attend.

If you’re hoping I can arm you with tricks like writing with the freezer door open and the computer festooned with tinsel, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. Like most people who have written for magazines I’m familiar with the situation of writing for one season while experiencing another. It just takes a combination of imagination and research.

The book was well underway when My Weekly magazine requested that a serial I was writing for them be set at Christmas, too. If I was able to comply then they could offer me a great slot in their Christmas special issues, the issues that sell better than any others of the year. Obviously I grabbed the offer. But writing a Christmas novel and a Christmas serial at the same time did leave me feeling pretty Christmased out!

Would I write another Christmas book? Yes. It was poignant to have Ava and Sam deal with difficult issues when they’re expected to be jolly and everyone else seems preoccupied with sparkly clothes and wrapping gifts. Christmas is a great vehicle for highs and lows (and, don’t worry, they get their highs, too!).

I find myself looking forward to Christmas more, this year to seeing my book on the shelves and hoping that it contributes to readers’ happy Christmases. #MyPromise is I’ve done my best, anyway.

Thanks very much for your interesting post, Sue, and best of luck with the paperback launch for The Christmas Promise (released 1 December 2016, available for pre-order now).

Bio:

Award-winning author Sue Moorcroft writes contemporary women’s fiction with occasionally unexpected themes. A past vice chair of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and editor of its two anthologies, Sue also writes short stories, serials, articles, writing ‘how to’ and is a creative writing tutor. She’s won a Readers’ Best Romantic Read Award and the Katie Fforde Bursary.

Wednesday, 21 September 2016

I haven’t blogged here for a while, because summer term was busy, both at home and with my neetsmarketing work, and I decided to take the summer holidays off from blogging and social media (apart from my work for the HNS Conference). This summer, I went back to three places where I’ve lived,
without really intending to. It just kind of happened.

Simon Michael's launch for An Honest Man

1.Birmingham where I was born: In June for client, Simon Michael’s book launch for An Honest Man at No5 Chambers, where I tweeted as my
alter-egoneetsmarketing

It was one of the most stylish launches I've attended with cocktails, and canapés, and actor, Robert Daws read a couple of excerpts beautifully with different voices for the characters. Simon's agent, Lisa Eveleigh has written a lovely post on the launch here.

Although I only lived in Solihull for the first year or so of my
life, going back did make me think about how time flies, especially as I knew I'd be returning to Lancaster and Siena this summer.

Me, Adrienne Vaughan and Jules Wake at the RNA Conference, Lancaster

2. Lancasterwhere I
went to school (and nearby Low Bentham where I lived for five years) for the
Romantic Novelists' Association Conference

3.Siena, Italy where I studied, then au paired for eight months
in 1994:I went to Italy this summer, and showed Siena to my
family for the first time

We went
to look at the outside of a flat where I rented a room, in Via di San Martino, off the Piazza del
Campo. Unfortunately, the bar below which my flatmates and I used as a living
room and somewhere to take phone calls from our parents has closed down. We
ate lunch at Gallo Nero, where I used to make my way through carafes of Chianti
and bowls of pasta with friends. It’s away from the main restaurants which were
too busy, and we were given a lovely table in the corner, where I ate the most
delicious home-made gnocchi with a duck sauce, washed down with a
couple of glasses of Prosecco. Siena is
the magical Tuscan city which inspired my first novel. We also visited the
seaside town of Castiglione della Pescaia where my au pair family had a house.

Castiglione della Pescaia

Going back makes you
think.

Birmingham was the first of many places where I've lived. My family
moved around a bit when I was a child, then I moved to Cambridge (with time spent living in Grenoble and Siena), London (where
I rented a few flats with friends), and now Surrey where I’ve remained in the
same house for almost ten years, the longest I’ve lived anywhere.

Low Bentham, in
the heart of North Yorkshire is where I sat
at my mum’s typewriter one summer (because there wasn't much to do), aged ten and wrote a series of stories about
a pink mouse and sent them to Ladybird: Pink Mouse’s Birthday, Pink Mouse Goes
to the Dentist, Pink Mouse’s Adventure at the Supermarket; you get the picture.
I used to make up a lot of stories for my sister who is six years younger than
me. The beautifully-worded rejection letter is in the loft somewhere (waiting to be dug out, scanned and tweeted when I’m published ;-)). I also went through a phase of
putting together a monthly magazine, and used the photocopier where my dad
worked to make copies for my friends. I really wanted to write, even then. The main character in my first novel is
from a farm in North Yorkshire.

High Bentham, up the hill from Low Bentham

Lancaster is
where I had the two most inspiring English
teachers. We read and discussed Jane Eyre, A Christmas
Carol, The Merchant of Venice, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I
can still hear one of them, Mr Church saying, ‘2L, it’s like talking to a wall’. We acted
out A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the school gardens one summer, and it was a lot
of fun.

When I first started
writing, my thoughts were to write about something I already know and understand.
This seems to be what a lot of writers do, while learning the craft of writing.

Now I write about places
and things I don’t know as much about, which is more difficult, but it
means I’ve moved forwards as a writer (hopefully).

Going back makes you
see places from a different point of view.

I last saw Low Bentham
as a fourteen-year-old in the 1980s, when my friends were in love with Tom Cruise, the album of the moment was The Joshua Tree, and we'd read Smash Hits on the bus, tearing out lyrics and posters for our walls. Now I’m older than my parents were when we lived
there, a scary thought.

Me in Siena in 1994

I last saw Siena ten
years ago, and before that in 1994. First I viewed Siena as a student, then
as an au pair, then as the mother of a one-year-old going away for the weekend with friends.
This time, I viewed Siena through the eyes of my husband and children, and I was
so pleased that they liked Siena as much as I do. When you love a place, you
want those you love to love it as much as you do. When I read my first novel
now, written from the point of view of a twenty-one year old woman, the same age as I was
in 1994, that life seems alien to me. Especially as the life of a twenty-something is so different now. And one struggle I always had when writing that novel was making the main character different from me.

At
the RNA conference in July, Alex Brown said that in her forties she found it
difficult to write about women in their twenties, and at the HNS Conference, Tracy
Chevalier said she writes historical novels to step
outside of herself as it's easier to slip into autobiography in a contemporary setting (See Lorna
Fergusson’s post here for more on Tracy’s talk). It’s reassuring to hear what they both said.

This blog is almost
five years old, I can’t believe it. In October
2011, I thought that I was almost ready to be published. But I wasn’t, and although I feel
that it’s getting closer, more time will pass before it happens. I have to say that
I’ve gone through phases of really trying, and of not trying hard enough,
because life has got in the way a little. But I’m still writing, and feeling
especially inspired after a recent pitch at the HNS conference-see my neetsmarketing post here.
And a few months ago, a well-known, and successful
agent approached me asking to see my work. Although they liked parts of it,
they didn’t feel strongly enough to take it on, but the fact that this agent
approached me with an informal email (which I’ve printed and pinned to the
notice board above my desk), something I could never have dreamed of when I
started this blog, was a real boost, and another step up the ladder to being
published. And for anyone who says that blogging
and being on social media isn’t worth it for writers, well, I’d say it might
be.Previous post: My Mother and The Durells

Thursday, 5 May 2016

Tomorrow it will be fourteen years since my mother passed
away. Time heals, but there are reminders of her everywhere, which creep up
when I least expect them to. Once someone has gone, they're so quickly forgotten (unless they're in the public eye), and now some time has passed, these reminders which once made me sad, help to keep my memories of her alive.

The latest reminder is the wonderful Sunday night TV series,
The Durrells. My Family and Other Animals was one of my mother’s favourite
books, and she gave me a copy when I was around seven years old. It was one of
those books that stayed with me, and that copy is in the loft somewhere (must read it again). Some books you remember reading more than others, and I still recall the picture I built up in my mind of Gerald Durrell’s life in that house in Corfu.

What’s so great about The Durrells? Pure escapism: it’s set in
Corfu where the sun always shines, all the characters in the Durrell family have flaws,
and the overall message is it’s OK when things go wrong, when your kids don’t
do what you expect them to; and I especially like Larry’s life as a writer-the
scene where he’s sitting under a tree tapping furiously on his typewriter, when he says, ‘I’m in the
mood’. In last Sunday's episode, he received a rejection letter for
his novel; and after a long discussion with his girlfriend, he decided to give up being a writer and became a farmer for the day. Farming didn’t suit him, and at one point he cut his foot with a spade. By the
end of that episode, he announced that he was to be a writer and an intellectual. Besides all this, the actors are so well cast, led by Keeley Hawes, who plays Mrs Durrell beautifully.

The Durrells, like Downton Abbey transports you to
a time when life was simpler and when there were fewer distractions. Today, I’m
sure that the Durrells would have more of an outdoor life than in the UK
because of the better weather and different culture: but if they had WiFi in
that lovely house by the sea, perhaps Gerald would be too busy playing
Minecraft on his iPad to capture and learn about animals and insects; Leslie might
play Grand Theft Auto all day and night with strangers rather than shoot anything that
moves; Margo might take pouty selfies and upload them to Instagram and
Snapchat; Larry could be too busy writing self-indulgent blog posts, tweeting under the hashtag #amwriting and posting rants on Facebook to get any
writing done. And Mrs Durrell would perhaps have discovered online dating. From
what I’ve read online, The Durrells is loosely based on Gerald Durrell’s
trilogy, but that doesn't bother me; it's an hour’s holiday on a Sunday
evening, and I'm sure that my mother would have loved watching it.

I’m running a course on social media for writers on Saturday
as my alter-ego neetsmarketing, and I went up to London yesterday to test out
the IT side of things. I had a couple of hours to spare before my meeting at
the hotel, so I went to a place where my mother always seems to be present: The
National Gallery. She used to take me to London often on the train as a child and
we’d go to The National Gallery before buying marmalade and sweets in Fortnum and Mason. At the time, I found this art gallery visit boring, as children generally do,
and I’d sit on the leather banquette biting my nails, waiting for her to hurry up and finish
studying the paintings, which seemed to take hours. But now I go there whenever I’m in London if I can, to see the paintings from my work in progress. Each time, I notice something
different, and being that close to them fuels the old inspiration.

Last Tuesday, I met Alison for lunch at
the London Book Fair (I attended as my alter-ego, neetsmarketing) to talk about the HNS conference publicity, and later on that day, I
went to the launch for Alison’s latest thriller in the Roma Nova series,
INSURRECTIO, where I got my hands on a signed paperback, and met up with some lovely author friends. Here's a selfie from our lunch:

Thank you, Alison for taking the time to write this post, and over to you!...

Getting organised – taming your research, by Alison Morton

Research. Yeah, I know, a sticky
subject in more ways than one. Writing of any sort needs research whether it’s
a modern shoes-and-shopping story, fantasy, crime thriller or a historical magnum
opus. Readers will engage with your story as long as you keep their trust.
So your story has to be plausible (even the elves...). Strongly coupled with this is the internal consistency of your book’s world,
especially if it’s historical, science fiction or gritty urban crime. Readers
investing their precious reading time in a rather strange place is high-risk
for them. So you must build that world carefully and thoroughly or your
credibility will crumble.

Leaving aside the cracking plot you’ve
dreamed up, its setting has to be woven into the story. You have to know the
scenery, weather, what the inhabitants look like, their clothes, beliefs and
values, do they use buses, trains, horses, or just plod everywhere on foot? Can
they vote and/or are they subject to a lord or lady’s whim?

Where do you start looking? What
resources do you have or can reach without breaking the bank? And how do you
organize what you’ve amassed?

Let’s get practical!

1. Identify what do you need
For my latest Roma Nova thriller, INSURRECTIO, I already had a good general
background in history, politics and economics with geography thrown in and a
small specialist library of books on Roman life, women in Rome, and modern
military women from writing previous books in the series. But for this new one I
needed information about military tactics and weaponry, police procedures,
journey times, internal government procedures, mounting a coup d’état, dictatorships and resistance organisation.

Of course, if you’re writing a romance around an ice-cream shop, you’ll need to
dig into recipes, different types of milk, cream and flavourings, food handling
and hygiene standards, tourism, supply systems within the catering industry,
landlord and tenancy regulations, employment law, shop-fitting, weather
patterns, etc.

You may already know something about those topics; I’d been in the military and
studied women in military roles and living under a dictatorship, but I sat down and read
up on the things I knew I’d forgotten. My advice is to immerse yourself in the
period/world first so that your writing flows naturally when you come to draft the
story.

2. Focus
your research
Draw up a list of questions with spaces in-between, then sit down and
write a short paragraph in answer to each. For example, what kind of climate
does your setting have? In Roma Nova, it’s a merge of mountain with Mediterranean,
which means longish summers; snow, high alps and pine trees in the mountains;
grapes and olives in the lower land; and dust and heat in mid-August in the
city. This will not only help your brain remember specifics subconsciously as
you write, but will be a valuable reference tool if you forget something!

3. Note
your sources

Always jot down where you found your
information whether online or in the library or notes taken at a workshop. If
you’re a normal human being, you will forget. If I take a photo of something
fabulous in a museum, I always take one of the label; was that vase from the 1st
century BC or AD? If your heroine is looking through a contract, what’s the
reference for the Sales and Supply of Goods Act being replaced by the Consumer
Rights Act? And where did you read the difference between a Glock and a Sig
Sauer?

4. Don’t exclude anything Printed sources are obvious, but don’t discount the Internet. Wikipedia
has improved exponentially in the past few years and the bibliographies and
references at the end of articles can yield rich pickings. These references can
be easily stored - see 4 below – but be
ready to record and organise photos, podcasts, film and interviews. A
smartphone is very handy for this as long as you download content to your
online storage as soon as you can.

Protopage

5. Files or files?
I’m a digital creature, so I tend to photograph, scan and store everything
online. But I back up to Dropbox, to an external hard disk called Time Machine
and lastly, to a remote storage server ‘somewhere in Kansas’. (Actually, it’s
in the Netherlands.) Instead of bookmarks for virtual links, I use Protopage computer
desktop organiser where I can organize my references into discrete
groupings: my books, Roman, other
research, writing technique, dictionaries and glossaries, marketing/PR,
self-publishing and that ubiquitous one ‘General’. Protopage is a free
programme and you can just scroll down if you don’t want to see the adverts at
the top. www.protopage.com

I have a few
paper-based files, mostly newspaper clippings, brochures, maps including an FAA
one of flight paths over Washington and New York – absolutely mesmerising! I
carry a notebook when I’m out to jot down overheard conversations or little
gestures people make, and to note information and sources other people give me.
I’ve usually taken a photo on my phone if it’s a building. And of course
reference books are the stalwarts of research on which tend to use Post-it
notes; I simply cannot bring myself to write on them.

My last piece of advice:
whether writing historical, contemporary, crime or alternate history like my
Roma Nova thrillers, be meticulous and methodical, whatever method you choose
to organise your research.

Thank you for such a helpful post, Alison. I look forward to using your tips to re-organise my mountain of research books on the eighteenth century, newspaper articles, country house guidebooks, online articles and scribbled notes! Protopage looks especially helpful. Congratulations on the launch of INSURRECTIO, and best wishes for continued success with your novels!

Find out
more about Alison and INSURRECTIO below:

INSURRECTIO

‘The second
fall of Rome?’
Aurelia Mitela, ex-Praetorian and imperial councillor in Roma Nova, scoffs at
her intelligence chief when he throws a red file on her desk.

But early 1980s
Roma Nova, the last province of the Roman Empire that has survived into the
twentieth century, has problems – a ruler frightened of governing, a
centuries-old bureaucracy creaking for reform and, worst of all, a rising
nationalist movement with a charismatic leader.

Horrified when
her daughter is brutally attacked in a demonstration turned riot, Aurelia tries
to rally resistance to the growing fear and instability. But it may already be
too late to save Roma Nova from meltdown and herself from entrapment and
destruction by her lifelong enemy.…

Alison
Morton's bio

Even before she
pulled on her first set of combats, Alison Morton was fascinated by the idea of
women soldiers. Brought up by a feminist mother and an ex-military father, it
never occurred to her that women couldn’t serve their country in the armed
forces. Everybody in her family had done time in uniform and in theatre all
over the globe.

Busy in her day
job, Alison joined the Territorial Army in a special communications regiment
and left as a captain, having done all sorts of interesting and exciting things
no civilian would ever know or see. Or that she can talk about, even now…

But something
else fuels her writing… Fascinated by the mosaics at Ampurias (Spain), at their
creation by the complex, power and value-driven Roman civilisation she started
wondering what a modern Roman society would be like if run by strong women.

Monday, 29 February 2016

I’ve written
a few posts about inspiration on this blog, and recently I read Big Magic:
Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, a New York Times Best Seller for over
200 weeks: a memoir of her journey of self-discovery, set in Italy, India and
Bali; and a film with Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem. If you’ve visited this
blog before, you’re likely to know that I’m a big Italy fan (and yoga fan too),
and so of course I bought Eat Pray Love as soon as I heard about it, and went to
see the film when it came out at the cinema. Elizabeth Gilbert writes in a particularly
engaging way, somehow provoking those thoughts that you brush away when going about
daily life.

I like to
read how-to-write books, my favourite being On Writing by Stephen King (mentioned
here in previous post, How Do You Get Past Writer’s Block?), and these books live on the same shelf as
my favourite novels, and eighteenth century research books. Big Magic is one of
those books you might want to flick through when you can’t bring yourself to
write, when you’re ready to give up, and when the idea of being a writer is
driving you nuts; but because you’ve started you feel that you can’t go back to
not being a writer. Elizabeth Gilbert is like a gentle mother reassuring a
small child, with the message don’t worry, it’s all OK, you can have a break from it if
it’s too much, you’re good enough to be a writer. And all that work you’ve done
so far-even if it’s a load of old rubbish and you’ll never use it-has been
worthwhile because it’s helped you develop as a writer. Think of Big Magic as a mother’s
advice tailored to your writing life.

A favourite part of Big Magic is
about ‘combinatory play’. Elizabeth talks about how, if you’re stuck to get
involved with another kind of creative activity:

‘Once, when I was struggling with a book, I signed up for a drawing
class, just to open up some other kind of creative channel within my mind.’

She
goes on to say:

'Einstein called this tactic “combinatory play”-the act of opening up
one mental channel by dabbling in another.......Part of the trick of
combinatory play, I think, is that it quiets your ego and your fears by
lowering the stakes.’

When I get stuck, I visit potential scenes from my work in progress and take photos, go for scenic walks and take photos, up the yoga classes, do research, read bits of novels which I consider to
be the best ever written, read novels set in the same time period as my work
in progress, read how-to-write books, make a cake or a big roast lunch for my family. I write
blog posts like this one.

There are
lots of thoughts and ideas to ponder upon in Big Magic, and when you find
yourself pausing the writing because life gets in the way, and can’t seem to
unpause: I’d recommend keeping a copy of Big Magic on standby.

Since last month’s post, Taking the #amwriting seriously, I have been doing as the title suggests (apart from a half
term pause), but I’ll keep Big Magic within my reach next to On Writing, just
in case.

And here’s a YouTube clip from Eat Pray Love. When I went
to see this film at the cinema, the friend sitting next to me started to fall
asleep as it’s quite a long film, and you either ‘get’ the middle ‘Pray’ part
in India where Elizabeth Gilbert does a lot of meditating and soul-searching, or
you don’t. But when the ‘Love’ part of the film began in Bali with Javier
Bardem, she sat up in her chair and said, ‘Who is that?’

Some reviews of Eat Pray Love say the book is self-indulgent, but both book and film resonated with
me; perhaps because I like the way Elizabeth Gilbert writes, or because of the Italy part, the
yoga part, or due to Javier’s appearance in the film. Who knows?

Thursday, 21 January 2016

I mentioned in my previous Writing Reflections and Plans post that this neetswriter blog
helps to keep my writing in check, and that’s certainly true.

I’ve been working on my novel daily with a new determination,
updating my spreadsheet with the word count, working towards my end of month target, even when the word count decreases because I’ve
cut bits out. This is the year of my book, this is the year that I’ll submit my
book 2, and my goal is to get it finished before the Historical Novel Society Conference. My deadline is 2 September 2016.

There are days, aren’t there, where you write, and you
produce rubbish, and you read it back (or don't even bother because you know it's totally rubbish), and think, ‘this isn’t working, and it
never will.’ The next day, you say to yourself, ‘I’m going to leave it today,
it’s just not working.’ Then it can be a week or more before you return to your
manuscript. But I can’t do that this year, if I’m going to get book 2
finished. I need to produce the rubbish to produce the good stuff (but ideally produce writing gold all of the time). Because it’s
like learning to drive (pre-Sat Nav), when you got lost and drove around for
ages, trying to find your way to the right road. I had to get lost all of those
times to get to know the roads around me. And isn’t that the case with many
things? You have to get a bit lost to find your way, you have to make mistakes
to know when you’re not making mistakes.

So there you go, my first neetswriter post of 2016.

A belated Happy New Year, and best wishes for a fantastic
2016.

And in true neetswriter blog tradition, I’m posting a summer
holiday photo because it’s cold out there (in the UK), and the above photo is of a place where I’d like
to be right now, watching the boats speed up and down Lake Garda. With perhaps one of these in my hand and a good book to read:

My neetswriter blog has become an ongoing pep talk to myself, a useful way to keep my writing in check. Writing has become a thing that gets squeezed in between
other things, but I do want to carry on with it. One achievement this year is
that I have fallen back in love with writing (as per my June post), and I’ve spent a significant amount of time on my work in progress, which has moved forwards in
the past few months. But my WIP is a big project, being partly set in the
eighteenth century, a period I'm drawn to (and I don't know why!); and it will take time to complete, mainly because of the research involved.

From 2016 I shall
be an Associate Member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association ("RNA") as my alter-ego, neetsmarketing, a freelance social media manager with clients in the world of books. This means that I’ll be leaving the RNA's New Writers’ Scheme (a
wonderful, supportive scheme for unpublished writers) at the end of this year. I’ve
been on the NWS since 2010, and I think it’s time to free up a space for
someone else. I’ll continue to write, of course, and pursue my quest to be
published in other ways. It’s such a privilege to be accepted as an Associate
Member of the RNA, wearing my neetsmarketing hat.

Also, I’m excited to tell you that I've been invited by Jane
Bidder to speak about social media for writers at the Freelance Media Group in London on 14 March 2016.

I’d like to thank everyone who has supported my neetswriter
blog in 2015, and my neetsmarketing blog which I launched this time last year.
My neetsmarketing blog on social media for writers and book marketing has received more support than I ever expected, and I’ve
had some fabulous guests this year too. My latest neetsmarketing post, inspired by client questions is 19 Tips on How to be the Ideal Blog Guest.

Now I’m off to locate the Michael Bublé Christmas CD, which has completely disappeared, and to make some mince pies. I wish you all a
Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year. See you in 2016!

About Me

Writer and Freelance Social Media Manager with clients in the world of books. Used to work in the City, as manager to a structured derivatives documentation team. Studied French and Italian at university and lived in Siena, Italy. Writer of historical fiction set in 18thc Venice and English country houses. Associate Member of the Romantic Novelists' Association. Former Social Media Manager for the Historical Novel Society (Aug 2014- 4 Sept 2016) and Publicity Officer for #HNSOxford16. Find out more via my website: www.neetsmarketing.com